i'm reading Touch The Dragon by Karen Connelly now. it's a journal of her experiences when she went to stay at Thailand for a year at the tender age of 17. An age when most Singaporeans are in a dilemma about which route they should pursue after the Almighty "O"s.

My god.

she writes in metaphors and rhetorical devices. she plays around with language, using nouns as verbs and vice versa. she employs an all-rounded assualt on your consciousness, by detailing what she observed, smelt, heard, touched and felt.

******************************

i have been telling people these days that i don't want to think too much, that i aspire to be simple-minded, that i find writing a chore because i often digress and write so much that by the time i have come to write about something that's deeper to my heart, i'm exhausted. they appear bemused at how serious i sound.

what i don't tell people is: i'm sick and tired of my functional sentences that are in sync with the conventionalised rules of the English language but don't evoke this additional emotion/wanderlust/imagination from the reader, including myself. i hesitate to think because i strongly suspect that my mental faculties won't stretch beyond the mundane and trivial. That despite a penchant for authenticity and originality, all i can do at best is to pen down sentiments that everyone else have thought of before but are just too ill-disciplined to write/hate writing/think they are lousy in English etc etc

If I'm not special, i don't want to know i'm not.

*************************************

There is no resolution in sight. No Duh-inducing rabbit-pulling out of my bag of tricks and proclaiming, "I am a born-again thinker! I may not be extraordinary but I will hone my skills to be the best thinker and writer I can be! Appreciate my own unique point of view!"

This is a mental note to remind myself of the kind of person I ultimately want to be, despite my current hiatus of escapism-indulging. Like Karen, I want to look at a beggar and think about Karma and religion. Like her, I want to take ordinary everyday events, look beneath the surface and draw the deeper insights about a country and its people. I want to do justice to the life I'm living. And I'm not getting any younger.